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The $2.6 billion Curiosity made its dramatic arrival on Martian terrain Monday

"The image sequence received so far indicates Curiosity had, as expected, a very exciting ride," NASA says

NASA released the first color images of the surface of Mars from its new rover Curiosity on Tuesday, showing a dusty, tan desert dominated by the rim of the crater where the craft landed.

The image -- shot at an angle by a camera on Curiosity's still-stowed robotic arm -- shows the sandy plain ahead of the rover and the northern rim of Gale Crater, where the rover touched down early Monday. The image was shot through a retractable, transparent dust shield over the lens, making it "kind of murky," said Ken Edgett, a senior scientist for the camera's builder, Malin Space Science Systems.

Controllers wanted to make sure the camera still functioned after Curiosity's 352-million-mile voyage and harrowing landing early Monday, Edgett told reporters at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.

"This was basically a focus test," he said, adding, "It works. It's awesome. We can't wait to open it and see what else we can see."

The crater rim seen in the photo is more than 20 km (12.5 miles) from the rover, Edgett said.

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Exploring Mars – Water-ice clouds, polar ice and other geographic features can be seen in this full-disk image of Mars from 2011. NASA's Mars Curiosity Rover touched down on the planet on August 6, 2012. Take a look at stunning photographs of Mars over the years. Check out images from the Mars rover Curiosity.

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Exploring Mars – This image was captured in 1976 by Viking 2, one of two probes sent to investigate the surface of Mars for the first time. NASA's Viking landers blazed the trail for future missions to Mars.

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Exploring Mars – The Valles Marineris rift system on Mars is 10 times longer, five times deeper and 20 times wider than the Grand Canyon. This composite image was made from NASA's Mars Odyssey spacecraft, which launched in 2001.

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Exploring Mars – The Nili Fossae region of Mars is one of the largest exposures of clay minerals discovered by the OMEGA spectrometer on Mars Express Orbiter. This image was taken in 2007 as part of a campaign to examine more than two dozen potential landing sites for NASA's new Mars rover, Curiosity, also known as the NASA Mars Science Laboratory.

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Exploring Mars – NASA's Mars Phoenix Lander descends to the surface of Mars in May 2008. Fewer than half of the Mars missions have made successful landings.

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Exploring Mars – Phoenix's robotic arm scoops up a sample on June 10, 2008, the 16th Martian day after landing. The lander's solar panel is seen in the lower left.

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Exploring Mars – In 2006, NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Spirit captured a 360-degree view known as the McMurdo panorama. The images were taken at the time of year when Mars is farthest from the sun and dust storms are less frequent.

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Exploring Mars – The European Space Agency's Mars Express captured this view of Valles Marineris in 2004. The area shows mesas and cliffs as well as features that indicate erosion from flowing water.

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Exploring Mars – This view is a vertical projection that combines more than 500 exposures taken by Phoenix in 2008. The black circle on the spacecraft is where the camera itself is mounted.

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Exploring Mars – A portion of the west rim of the Endeavour Crater sweeps southward in this view from NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity in 2011. The crater is 22 kilometers (13.7 miles) across.

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Exploring Mars – A photo captured by NASA's Mars Global Surveyor in 2000 offers evidence that the planet may have been a land of lakes in its earliest period, with layers of Earth-like sedimentary rock that could harbor the fossils of any ancient Martian life.

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Exploring Mars – A U.S. flag and a DVD containing a message for future explorers of Mars, science fiction stories and art about the planet, and the names of 250,000 people sit on the deck of Phoenix in 2008.

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Exploring Mars – A rock outcrop dubbed Longhorn and the sweeping plains of the Gusev Crater are seen in a 2004 image taken by the Mars Exploration Rover Spirit.

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Exploring Mars – Although it is 45 kilometers (28 miles) wide, countless layers of ice and dust have all but buried the Udzha Crater on Mars. The crater lies near the edge of the northern polar cap. This image was taken by NASA's Mars Odyssey Orbiter in 2010.

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Exploring Mars – NASA's Opportunity examines rocks inside an alcove called Duck Bay in the western portion of the Victoria Crater in 2007.

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Exploring Mars – Pictured is a series of troughs and layered mesas in the Gorgonum Chaos region of Mars in 2008. This photo was taken by Mars Orbiter Camera on the Mars Global Surveyor.

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Exploring Mars – An image captured in 2008 by NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter shows at least four Martian avalanches, or debris falls, taking place. Material, likely including fine-grained ice and dust and possibly large blocks, detached from a towering cliff and cascaded to the gentler slopes below.

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Exploring Mars – This 2008 image spans the floor of Ius Chasma's southern trench in the western region of Valles Marineris, the solar system's largest canyon. Ius Chasma is believed to have been shaped by a process called sapping, in which water seeped from the layers of the cliffs and evaporated before it reached the canyon floor.

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Exploring Mars – Pictured is the Martian landscape at Meridiani Planum, where the Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity successfully landed in 2004. This is one of the first images beamed back to Earth from the rover shortly after it touched down.

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Exploring Mars – An image from the Mars Global Surveyor in 2000 shows potential evidence of massive sedimentary deposits in the western Arabia Terra impact crater on the surface of Mars.

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Exploring Mars – The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter captures a dust devil blowing across the Martian surface east of the Hellas impact basin in 2007. Dust devils form when the temperature of the atmosphere near the ground is much warmer than that above. The diameter of this dust devil is about 200 meters (650 feet).

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Exploring Mars – Soft soil is exposed when the wheels of NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Spirit dig into a patch of ground dubbed Troy in 2009.

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Exploring Mars – An image from NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter shows the floor of the Antoniadi Crater in 2009.

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Exploring Mars – The larger of Mars' two moons, Phobos, is seen in 2008 from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.

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Exploring Mars – Earth and the moon are seen in 2007 from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. At the time the image was taken, Earth was 142 million kilometers (88 million miles) from Mars.

Search for 'building blocks' of Mars life

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Curiosity sends out first Mars photo

Other images beamed back in the first day and a half since the landing include 297 low-resolution color images of the final minutes of its descent. The pictures, posted on the space agency's website, show some of the gyrations Curiosity went through beneath its parachute and the dust kicked up as it touched down.

The $2.6 billion rover made its dramatic arrival on Martian terrain in a spectacle popularly known as the "seven minutes of terror." The landing involve a sky crane and the world's largest supersonic parachute, which allowed the spacecraft carrying Curiosity to target the landing area that scientists had meticulously chosen.

The probe was in "great shape" 36 hours after landing as NASA starts to activate the rover's systems, mission manager Michael Watkins said Tuesday afternoon. But he noted that adjustments need to be made to at least two systems.

Controllers plan to spend Curiosity's next day raising the mast that holds many of its remote sensors and tweak the high-bandwidth antenna that connects the rover to Earth.

"The antenna mechanism is in fine shape, but it was not quite pointed accurately enough at the Earth for us to get the telecom signal that we wanted," Watkins said. And the Rover Environmental Monitoring Station "did not work correctly" the second time the team tried to test its sensors, leading the researchers behind that project to go back and re-check the unit's data files.

"I would say that it does not appear to be significant at this time," Watkins said. "But these guys are off working it, and it's their baby. Let's let them think about it for a while."

The unit, known as the REMS, monitors ground and air temperatures, humidity, atmospheric pressure and ultraviolet light. Despite the glitches, Watkins said controllers remain in high spirits.

"These are the days that people worked five and 10 years for, going on right now," he said.

Curiosity is essentially a car-sized mobile science laboratory, packing 17 cameras, a laser that can survey the composition of rocks from a distance and instruments that can analyze samples from soil or rocks. The aim is to determine whether Mars ever had an environment capable of supporting life.

Its prime target is the 18,000-foot (5,500-meter) peak at the center of Gale Crater, Mount Sharp. The stratified composition of the mountain could give scientists a layer-by-layer look at the history of the planet.

Curiosity's landing site is about 12 km (7.5 miles) from the foot of the mountain, NASA project scientist Sara Milkovich said.

The rover is supposed to last for two years on Mars, but it may operate longer -- after all, Spirit and Opportunity, which arrived on Mars in 2004, were each only supposed to last 90 Martian days. Spirit stopped communicating with NASA in 2010 after getting stuck in sand, and Opportunity is still going.